The Crusade Continues: ‘I Know I Can Save This Country and No One Else Can’ : Thatcher: In her just published memoirs, Thatcher seems more than ever the American politician and the alien at home.

During her 11 1/2 years at Downing Street, Margaret Thatcher probably commanded more respect and affection in America than any British prime minister since Winston Churchill. Her robust, twice-week ly encounters in Parliament became compulsive watching on C-Span. She endeared herself to the nation through her friendship with Ronald Reagan, and was Reagan’s first and last foreign visitor during his presidency. The two shared an affinity that defined Western political thinking for a decade.

In Britain, her reputation was vastly different. A libertarian free-marketeer, she became leader of the Conservative Party almost by accident in 1975 and continued to represent a minority view throughout her ascendancy. Never anattractive personality, she was suffered rather than welcomed only because, it seemed, she got results. Her hectoring tone, adamancy and stilted manner were an embarrassment in a political climate more used to male urbanity.

The publication last week of the first volume of her memoirs, “The Downing Street Years,” has given the British press a much-needed opportunity to revisit this baffling political figure. They want to know why Thatcher mesmerized them and whether they abandoned her too soon. More than anything, they want to know why she failed.

In its search for an answer, the tabloid Daily Mirror has been taken to the High Court and acquitted for stealing a pre-publication copy of the book in order to spoil the Sunday Times’ serialization, held up until after the lady’s speech at this year’s Conservative Party Conference. Television has launched a series of high-profile documentaries about her, introduced, amusingly, by the host of a weekly program on antiques. And David Frost has invited the lady onto his chat show for a public endorsement of her successor, John Major--which she delivered only after the same momentary pause that Major gave her, we now learn, when she asked for his support in her final bid for survival in 1990.

Her book catalogues the main achievements of her office: the Falklands dispute, her confrontation with the unions, the extension of property ownership, denationalization and the transformation of Britain’s reputation abroad. But the main question tainting her career is why her economic policies--the core of her political agenda--did not work. In her own mind, it is because she wasn’t given enough time: a defense that she denies to the British liberal-socialist consensus that she sought to overthrow.

Does she know that she failed? She ought to, for this is why her party brought her down. By 1988, in spite of having won three consecutive general elections, inflation and unemployment were soaring and the Labor Party was dictating the major issues of the day. And yet, she seems unaware. “I understood that some of my Cabinet colleagues and other ministers were moving to the left, some more to the right. But I believed that they had generally become convinced of the rightness of the basic principles as I had. I now know that such arguments are never finally won.”

What many see as national disaster--a country in economic gridlock and social breakdown after 14 years in which the Conservatives had it all their own way--she sees simply as a personal tragedy: a prophet vanquished. Thatcher cannot say what went wrong; she still does not understand that anything went wrong, except that she was let down and betrayed by those she was forced to rely on.

This is poignantly revealed in the last chapter of her book, dealing with her demise. Normally a humorless woman, she here recalls with unexpected irony how each of her ministers visited her with the news that she could not continue. “It was touching that so many people seemed worried about my humiliation,” she notes after another pusillanimous wretch has trotted out the formula that while he would back her, he feared that no one else would. This was the woman who addressed the nation with unpalatable truths about its health. She could be no less straightforward about her own.

The Thatcher paradox lies in her assurance of her own redemptive powers. She had an essentially American notion of leadership--kingship with religious overtones. Beyond the glitzy conventions and overt image manipulation she enjoyed a messianic certainty, quoting Lord Chatham 200 years earlier, that “I know that I can save this country and that no one else can.” An evangelist of the Chicago School, she wanted to change the way people thought, not just the way they voted. She was a crusader first, perhaps never a politician.

The foreign press has tended to highlight petty barbs about her European counterparts: Francois Mitterrand was hypocritical, Helmut Kohl provincial. But her observation of them as individuals is always less important than the intolerance she reveals for them or anyone not “one of us,” her code word for those who had seen the light. Her own view of foreign policy was extrapolated from the simple view that communism was evil. For her, the test of character was whether one agreed.

George Bush, she remarks, was easy to get on with “but had never had to think through his beliefs and fight for them, as Reagan and I had had to do. This meant that much of his time was taken up with reaching for answers to problems which to me came quite spontaneously because they sprang from my inner convictions.”

Why did she fail? Because for capitalism to work, there have to be losers as well as winners; because growth is not always possible; because the economy is not a closed loop; because the market is not perfect; because people are unpredictable. Politics is not the application of methodologies or dogmas nor the conversion of the innocent by demagoguery and intimidation. This, Thatcher never learned. She had an economic model and expected her electorate to conform to it. For better or worse, they didn’t.